Limiting a user to one specific web site.

[btucker19]

I have a user who needs access to a particular website, but the boss doesn't want him to have access to any other places on the web. How can I do this using NT4.0 server? How can I set this up in Microsoft Management Console? The site that the user must access is Humana.com. The client is Windows 2000. Thanks in advance for your help X-)

 

[mcconmw]

If you have a router, you can allow the users computer to connect to the website's ip address and deny it to all other addresses. If you don't have control of a router you could remove the dns addresses from the client machine and add a lmhosts file with only the address of humana. This leave the person unable to resolve any other addresses although if the person knew what they were doing they could use ip addresses surf. Good luck.

 

[french01]

I've been pondering on you question and came up mcconmw's suggestions, as well as:

Setting up an internal web server that mirrored the target site. (get approval of the site authors)
Impliment a Proxy solution that only allowed the target site (probably the better of all these).
Impliment a corporate "Internet access security" solution that restricted users by loginID and machine name. (how fat is your wallet?)

All these require extra effort, extra software, extra licencing.

You could go to some extrodinary lengths to restrict the user, but the question remains... Why? Is it worth that much effort? Is the user that untrustworthy? Why not just trust the employee to do the job? Any side benifit of a bit of surfing in his lunch hour would most likely have positive benifits in employee satisfaction leading to improved productivity when "on task".

This doen't help you too much when the boss demands a lock down solution. So if it was me, I'd go with the proxy, (at least it would be the easiest to open up to other sites when a business need came up.

Hope it helps.
-Hugh